Michael Gold, a retired obstetrician who lives in Barrington, has something in common with John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate.

Both men were prisoners of war — Gold during World War II, McCain during the Vietnam War.

Gold thinks there is something else he shares with McCain from the POW experience — posttraumatic stress disorder.

Gold is 87, but it was only 11 years ago, while he was running a clinic for underprivileged women in Rutland, Vt., that he was diagnosed with PTSD. The signs had been there for decades, but in the demands of coming home, going to school, raising a family and building a medical practice, he chose not to deal with them.

Now, looking back, he sees bizarre moments that can be explained by only one thing. He remembers having physical fights with other doctors during discussion of patient care plans. The fights were just part of a long list of abrupt turns in behavior.

“I would never know what would trigger bizarre responses.”

There are the nightmares that continue still. His wife, Linda, will tell him the next morning how he dealt with them.

The behavior was tough on his first wife and it is tough on his second, says Gold.

Like McCain, Gold divorced and remarried.

Linda sometimes refers to her husband’s “PTSD moments,” the sudden temper tantrums often prompted by very minor incidents.

“People cannot reach you when you’re in the moment,” says Gold.

And that’s what worries him when it comes to John McCain as the possible commander in chief.

“It would be very dangerous,” he says.

When the McCain campaign came out a few weeks ago with a report that McCain is in very good health, it didn’t impress Michael Gold because it didn’t address the health question that he thinks is most crucial. It is a question that has hung over and around the McCain campaign since it began.

Other veterans find it makes them very uncomfortable because they respect McCain for those long, torture-filled years he endured in the Hanoi Hilton and for the fact that he passed up the chance to be released early because of his family connections. But the question is unavoidable.

There are tens of thousands of Vietnam veterans who came back with far less stressful tours of duty than McCain. And the war is with them still in those times of disconnection and confusion and anger that occur on no set schedule. There are broken marriages, lost jobs, hospital time, prison time.

Michael Gold goes to a group therapy session at the Providence VA Medical Center every month. It is all World War II veterans. They meet right after a group of Vietnam veterans at the PTSD clinic. They share those long years of not doing anything about a very serious problem.

“Most people didn’t tell about their experience,” says Gold. “How was anyone to know?”

He says the group is the best way to deal with PTSD. There are other people who know what he’s talking about when he talks about “the moment.”

The veterans talk about a lot of things. They don’t talk about religion or politics.

Gold, who was born in Newport, enlisted shortly after his 21st birthday in 1942. He became a navigator, and on his fourth mission over Germany his B-17 Flying Fortress was shot down. He jumped. He landed in a field and a farmer pointed a rifle at him. He was a prisoner in Germany for 16 months. Shortly after the Battle of the Bulge, he was moved to a “ghetto” barracks within the prison compound with other Jewish prisoners.

He remembers the night before that move. He thinks it could have been the beginning of the problem that would dog him the rest of his life.

“I knew they were not nice to a Jew in Germany,” he says.

But he was never tortured, never beaten during his imprisonment. He was just left uncertain what the next day would bring.

He pays a lasting price. And he wonders about the price paid by another prisoner from another war. He worries about a man carrying the same emotional burdens he does, or worse, becoming the most powerful man in the world.

Perhaps there is no need for worry. Perhaps John McCain made a clean break with his prison experience and suffers no lingering effects. But the question is a legitimate one that will eventually have to be dealt with.

bkerr@projo.com